One of the least discussed areas of digital marketing is how to drive up your conversion rate. There are lots of articles on driving traffic to your site (i.e. social media, PPC and SEO), but much to help you when people actually get to your site. Most C-Level Execs are keen to see their traffic go up because they want more conversions – but what about getting more from the traffic you are already generating? Here are five quick tips to drive your conversion rate up.

Know the path that 90% of your visitors will take: This may require some research to be undertaken and this can cost money (an investment). But typically, 4 or 5 key objectives will cover 90% of your visitors: for example, to find your opening hours, ask a question or find out if you sell a particular product. It is this 90% that you need to focus your website structure around. Forget about the remaining 10% or the edge cases as I call them, for now – they are in danger of taking your eye off the majority.

Make your visitor feel at home: You will receive traffic from a number of referrers – your analytics package will tell you from who and how many. You should create landing pages for the major referrers to your site, and tailor it around the website that they have just come from – e.g. if YouTube is a strong referrer to your site, then your landing page should include a video: you know that they like video because they have just come from a video sharing site! This works for other referrers too, e.g. short punchy sentences if the visitor is referred from Twitter. I can’t believe that more people have not recognised this and focused on it as a conversion driver – intuitively, this should drive your conversions!

Vary your content: The expectation of someone on a website in 2014 has never been higher – to see a simple catalogue or pages and pages of information is no longer good enough. Varying your content with video and ideally interactive media, which will be big in 2014, will engage the visitor and keep them interested in your proposition – and make sure that it translates to mobile too (of course!).

Write with your audience in mind: I have recently started a role in automotive, and there is a lot of terminology and acronyms – a lot. And when you are working in the industry, it is easy to use the terminology all the time, but the one place that you don’t use it is in front of the customer. The people who buy our vehicles are regular people, not car specialists, so technical terms on the website would make the visitor feel intimidated and out of their depth during what is the second largest household purchase – not a nice feeling. So, write with the 90% of visitors in mind, in language that they understand and meeting needs that they have.

Keep measuring: Unless you can demonstrate some progress with your conversion rate, you will not know if your efforts are having a positive or negative effect. And if you have spoken to your boss about not growing your traffic and focusing on optimising conversion rate, you need to be armed with this information!

These are just five tips, but there are thousands out there – why not leave a comment and share yours below?!